Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is a perfect toy.
A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.
This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.
Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.
This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.
There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.
And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!
A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.
This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.
Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.
This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.
There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.
And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!